3rd ROCK FROM THE SUN: Uncle's Dick!
by Dan Bivens
Summary: What would happen if Tim and Uncle Martin, from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, used Martin's CCTSB to go into the Future and wound up in the Ohio apartment of Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy? And just how do Dick and Martin know one another?
1. Chapter 1

**3rd ROCK FROM THE SUN**

"**Uncle's Dick!"**

Chapter 1

**The following takes place 32 hours, 29 minutes, and 14.47 seconds after the recent reversal of Dick and Sally back into their previous Human forms by way of the Big Giant Head...**

Loudly clopping up the stairs to their third-rate apartment, like a couple of drunken circus stallions barely able to stand on six-out-of-eight legs, Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy were currently engaged in some sort of silly disagreement that began we no not where...

"And I told you that it wasn't a parking space, Lieutenant!"

"C'mon, Dick, you were the one who whipped into that spot like it had shoes for sale! Pretty shoes."

"And never even bothered to notice the wrecking ball dangling nearby."

"Neither did you, you squint-eyed bonehead!"

"I'm no more a bonehead than any other Human, Tommy."

"Your head's all bone, Harry!"

"Will you two shut up! Isn't it enough the Rambler was very nearly flattened by that damned big ball?"

"Which, thanks to me, High Commander, was narrowly avoided!"

"Well, if any of the rest of us had boobs to flash like you, Lieutenant, we could've done the same thing!"

"By the way, Sally," said a stupidly smiling Harry after the quartet topped the stairs to stand in the midst of their tiny-yet-truly lived in living room. "They looked really nice. Just like I always dreamed."

"What?" Sally suddenly snarled as she spun toward the dumbest member of their space-spanning number with the squeezed-together features of someone maybe dumber than they'd thought. "Were you looking? I specifically told everyone not to look!"

"Well, uh," Dick, Harry, and Tommy clamored comically with a hint of genuine fear in regards to Sally's alien abilities to inflict injury and agony should such suit her. "We, uh, were afraid, uh, that you might hurt yourself or, uh, that the construction workers might, uh, make some sort of lewd gestures that, uh..."

"Yeah, well, the next time I flash these puppies," proclaimed Sally as she grasped her shirt-covered breasts a bit more roughly than any Human woman might. "You'd better make damn sure to keep your eyes closed! Or, so help me, I'll pluck 'em out then and there and play ping-pong with 'em! Perverts."

"Sorry, Sally, won't happen again."

The self-same second that Sally turned to stride, with those impossibly long legs, into the crazy kitchen just beyond...

Dick, Harry, and Tommy made ludicrous yet silent thumb-biting motions to further illustrate just how much of Sally's bared breasts they did, indeed, see.

Then, just like that, they straightened and nonchalantly followed after Sally.

At that instant, in the just-vacated living room, amidst a strange burst of smoke that disappeared as swiftly as two figures, one carrying a curious square-cornered device, promptly appeared...

"Wh-where are we Uncle Martin? Did we make it to the Future?"

Looking all around, the reddish-haired Martian-in-Human form, though his pseudo-nephew, Tim O'Hara, had no idea of any duplicity on the part of such a seemingly safe personage!, sat down his twice-used-to-go-into-the-Past CCTBS on the back of one of two overstuffed chairs.

"It would seem so, Tim," murmured the Martian known, during this latest foray on planet Earth, as Uncle Martin. "But I'm not so sure my Cathode-ray Centrifugal Time BreakaScope has brought us to a Future time-point in Los Angeles. According to my telepathic tapping of nearby minds..."

Tim stood by as, once again, Uncle Martin lifted fingertips to either side of his forehead in order to truly read minds.

"Well?"

"Hm. Even though there's a lot of curious confusion in the nearby minds I'm picking up...even more so than with Mrs. Brown!...I'm getting that we are in...Rutherford, Ohio."

"Ohio?" Tim almost said a little too loudly, but managed to comically catch himself in his typically spastic fashion. "But why Ohio? Why not just forty or so years in the Future of where we already were?"

"I don't know, Tim," Uncle Martin managed while looking down at his CCTBS' settings. "Something must have gone wrong with one of the multi-micro electroscopic temporal gyros that are responsible for grounding us to a specific place no matter the alteration of Time. Of course, this is the first time I've ever used my device to go into the Future. Usually just into the Past."

"Now you tell me."

At that exact instant, just returning from the kitchen with an overt variety of snack foods and sandwiches, the quartet of comical-though-cosmic visitors from a barred spiral galaxy a lot further away than Uncle Martin's Martian home stopped short...

"Hey! How'd you guys get in here?" Tommy remarked almost logically, as Harry would, like always, be the one to denote just how incredibly idiotic the Transmitter can be.

"Maybe they're here to fix the cable?"

"There's nothing wrong with the cable," said Sally with a humorous mien.

"Ah," Harry stupidly stated in typically close-eyed fashion. "Then they're work is done."

No sooner had Sally slapped the side of Harry's head, wherein the dumber member complained, "Hey, you break that Transmitter and you pay for it."

Such caused Sally to slap Harry's head again, just as Dick recognizingly, as well as exaggeratedly, exclaimed, "My God! It's a Martian!"

END OF CHAPTER 1


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

"Dick!"

"Exigius 12 and a half!"

"Who-gius?" Tim O'Hara suddenly asked at the exact same time as Tommy, Sally, and Harry.

"I go by the name Martin now, _Dick_," Uncle Martin curtly corrected in a tone that carried quite the distinct disdain for an equally catty Dick Solomon. "Just like you go by Dick instead of..."

The sudden series of dolphin-like clicks and screeches caused all four Rutherfordites...Rutherfordians?...to answer in a similarly silly-sounding fashion.

Which caused Tim to slap his hands over his ears and shout out, "What're you guys all speaking? Sounds like a flock of fishy porpoises...sees...si!"

"Dolphins, Tim," calmly corrected Martin, as he swiftly explained, whilst Dick, Tommy, Sally, and Harry looked at one another with comically confused countenances in regards to their usage of an alien language not spoken since first landing on Earth in Human forms in a red Rambler. "And I was speaking to Dick and these others in their native tongue. Or, to be more accurate...tongues."

"A-are you s-saying that these...people?...are from Mars, too?" stammered Tim.

"Mars?" Dick said with an unflappable pride not shown since his shared-with-Mary secretary, Nina, had jokingly asked if such was whence he had hailed. "I wouldn't be caught dead on that planet! And, believe me, if I went there in this body, I would be dead!"

"No, Tim," Uncle Martin steadily explicated. "Dick and his little 'family' come from a barred spiral galaxy some..."

"And they have Human names like 'Dick' way out there?" Tim interrupted whilst pointing off to his right in a forty-five degree angle.

Causing Dick to quite quickly realign Tim's arm a half-foot further forward and at a slightly steeper degree, "It's more in that direction, er, uh, Tim."

Tim's handsome face screwed itself into a totally perplexed, and comical, mask as he jerked the arm down as if he'd just been touched by a tentacled creature as slimy as the scum of a primordial pond.

"Anyway, Tim," proceeded the explanation via Uncle Martin, as Dick denoted discernible personal insult over Tim's not-nice reaction to being touched by an alien in Human form. "Though their real names are far too hard for any Human to try and pronounce, suffice it to say that for the past three years they have been so known by their current noms de l'homme that such is exactly how they perceive themselves."

"B-but their n-not Human at all?" pressed the slightly shaking Tim O'Hara, whilst stepping a little closer to Uncle Martin. Making Martin turn, knitted-browed, to give Tim his patented expression saying far more than mere words in regards to his pseudo-nephew's nervousness in the face of the fantastic.

"Uh, no, Tim. They're actually purple tubes about the size of..."

"Hey!" said Sally as she half-clumsily pushed her way to the front of their foursome. Causing Tim to suddenly smile whilst looking her luscious Self up, down, and up again. "We may be purple tubes beneath these borrowed bodies, but, dammit, we're Human now, buddy! So watch it!"

Even as Sally stabbed the air with one well-manicured finger, Tim quite comically made his move...

"Well? What's a nicely-wrapped purple tube like you doing on a planet like this?"

As Sally favorably reacted to the handsome Tim O'Hara's clear-cut sexually-fueled "hit" upon her, turning from terrorizing Amazonian to a too-greatly grinning, nibbling nervously on one fingernail, leg swinging pussycat...

Which caused Dick to step forth now, exaggeratedly shoving Sally back, as she clumsily caught herself whilst screwing her beauteous face into a half-feral mask of Comedic enmity toward Dick.

"And have you, Exigius 12 and a half..."

"Martin."

"...told Tim what you really are beneath that Human-like shell he's been seeing and speaking with?"

Even as Martin made silent signals for Dick to shut the hell up, his all-too-Human looking countenance a comically uncomfortable mask, Tim turned to quite curiously ask...

"Wh-what's he talking about, Uncle Martin? Y-you mean you don't really look like...th-this?"

"You've heard of 'little green men'?" rhetorically asked Dick, a smugger-than-normal expression dominating his bigger-than-necessary face-and-head. Then, after Tim exaggeratedly head-nodded, "Well, underneath that phony facade _is_ one! Very little and very green!"

As Tim swiveled his head in a ridiculous half-spiral from Dick to Martin to Dick and back to Martin, he sheepishly said, "Uh, U-Uncle M-Martin...Wh-what's he t-talking about?"

Even as a nervous giggle left Tim's tremulous lips, like it always would when he was very nervous!, Martin made an attempt to more fully explicate...

"You see, Tim, I'm not really a Human-like individual. I...and my entire race of Martians...are only about three inches in height and..."

"Oh, c'mon, 'Martin'," a less-than-patient purple tube-in-Dick's bumpy body loudly lauded, whilst too hurriedly pushing past Tim to tug hard, thrice!, on Uncle Martin's left earlobe. "Just show the kid already!"

Almost instantly, and almost exactly like what had appeared in a recently released, two years earlier, "Men In Black" movie, Uncle Martin's face hissed with a sudden release of internalized pressure...

"Voila!"

...only to open to reveal a literally little green "man", although his humanoid appearance was most definitely not at all Human and, again, more like that found in the 1997 film called "Men In Black".

Sitting inside an exceptionally super high-tech interior, wherein not only a number of micro-controls could be quite clearly viewed, but stereoscopic screens with which Exigius could "see" the outside world around him and, finally fully understandable to Tim!, those TV-type antennae that Martin would invariably raise just prior to popping out of visibility.

"Hello, Tim," a tiny, tiny voice said from the large-headed, hairless!, green-skinned, slightly scaly!, almond-eyed, but blue, not black!, situated inside the red-haired, Human head, which was what Tim had called "Uncle" for three years. "It might interest you to know that you're the first Human in history to see what I really look like. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn't claim that! Isn't that worth anything?"

"Y-y-y-you're n-n-n-not really Hu-Hu-Hu-Hu..."

"Human!" Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy loudly said so as to finish the still shaky Tim's barely-able-to believe reaction to such a stranger-than-fiction factoid.

"Y-yeah...o-one of th-those!"

"Tim," began the tiny-voiced, green-skinned little alien within the red-haired Human head, before working some of the controls surrounding him to, first, lift his left hand and, then, tug thrice upon that left earlobe so as to close-and-pressurize his faux face.

Then he continued in what Tim had come to know as Uncle Martin's oft-highfalutin tone...

"Tim, I'm sorry you had to see the real me like this, but I'm still the lovable Martian you once rescued and took into your home and heart. Just as you have irrevocably become part of my heart."

The clearing of four throats at the exact same time, from Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy, forced this Martian-in-a-Man shell to restate, "My _hearts_."

"Hearts?" Tim started, only to be almost playfully interrupted by Martin once more.

"It doesn't matter, Tim. You and I have become family since I crash-landed. The two of us have had lots of exciting times. Lots of adventures no other Human could claim. Not in all the hundreds of years I've been visiting this planet in my 'Martin-bot'. Such a shocking revelation, in regards to my true nature as a fellow Being sharing this same yellow star's system, shouldn't erase years of togetherness that has made you as much my real nephew as any I may have left behind on Mars."

Even as Martin's heartfelt words melted Tim's timidity as it pertained to the Martian within the Man, a teary-eyed, what one could actually see through those self-imposed slits of his!, Harry blatantly blubbered, "That's the most saddest thing I've ever heard that wasn't followed by a commercial for tarter-controlling toothpaste."

As Sally started to blubber as well, Dick loudly ordered, "Stop this immediately! No more melodrama in front of the High Commander! Or else...I might leak, too..."

As the foursome swiftly, as well as overly commodiously, returned to their previously overtly-stiff Selves, save for Harry who just seemed as stupid as usual...

"All right, you two...now explain exactly why you left wherever you're both from to come here! And what the hell is that thing on the back of my favorite chair?"

Before further words of detailed explication could slip past lips that Tim now knew were not truly Human, Uncle Martin said, whilst gesturing toward said overstuffed seats in the quaintly crowded little living room...

"Maybe we should all sit down first, Dick. Then I'll tell you everything."

END OF CHAPTER 2


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

"...and that's how Tim and I ended up in this Future, to us, time-period," finally finished Uncle Martin to Dick Solomon. Which, deep down below their fake physical exteriors, was a meeting of the minds 'twixt, quite literally, the little green "man" to the quivering purple tube.

"And," Dick began to ask of the red-haired Martian seated in one of two overstuffed chairs in the cramped and crowded little living room, whilst pointing at the device held so daintily in the lap of this visitor from not only Mars, but from a point in the Past some thirty-to-forty years removed. "That's the, uh, Centrifuge Cathode..."

"The Cathode-ray Centrifugal Time BreakaScope," quickly corrected Martin with more than a little air of aloofness that bordered on blatantly insulting a certain Solomon that was, in truth, the pompously self-proclaimed High Commander of this crazy quartet of space-spanning simpletons.

Three of whom had trotted out to their equally-cramped kitchen, leaving Tim O'Hara to sit, stupidly spellbound!, and stare somewhat comically at someone he'd called "Uncle" for around three years. Yet whom he now knew to be a "Martin-bot" with a three-inch tall, truly alien green-skinned being from Mars literally seated inside a fake faced, red-haired head.

Just like a recently, three years earlier for the Solomons, yet still in the near-distant Future for Tim and Martin, movie named "Men In Black".

Causing the still stupidly stupefied Tim to wonder if, somehow, 'twixt the Sixties and Nineties, Uncle Martin had been the fake flesh-and-fake bone inspiration for one specific scene described to Tim by Tommy, immediately prior to popping into the kitchen.

Along with that unbelievably beautiful, especially sexy, in any decade!, Sally Solomon.

While Martin and Dick continued talking about the CCTBS, Tim was much more concerned with other aspects of his telepathic/telekinetic Uncle...

"H-how d-do you, uh, m-make things m-move by p-pointing your, uh, finger?"

Whilst still trying to hold a semi-intelligent conversation with a fellow alien, only one that happened to come from a far-flung galaxy rather than a nearby, cosmically speaking!, red world, Martin managed to answer each silly little question posed by his pseudo-nephew...

"There is an electrostatic magnetron macro-accelerator assembly with directional micro-opening in the tip of my android carrier's right forefinger."

"A-and wh-when you r-read m-minds?"

"Tactile contact to either side of my, uh, 'head' engages an omni-directional psycho-scanner nano-transistor system that allows whatever within-range lower life-form entities are thinking to print out across a heads-up...inside _this_ head...set of screens."

Screwing an already comical mask into something even more amusingly addled, Tim tried to understand one single aspect of that perplexing statement...

"Uh, 'l-_lower_ life-form entities'?"

"He means _you_, Mr. O'Hara," tensely sighed Dick Solomon, while rolling his eyes in exasperated expression of just how jealous, deep down in his purple tubed being beneath that borrowed Human body!, the High Commander happened to be. "All the little green guys on Mars think like that. That's why I'd rather roast in the oppressive heat of the sulfur dioxide-carbonyl sulfide-isothermal-sulfuric acid raining surface of Venus for a hundred years than spend one lousy day on Mars!"

Also rolling his eyes, at least so with the ones used for providing visual information to the little green "man" seated inside said red-haired head!, and sighing very heavily, Martin bemoaned, "Dick, are you still pissed off over losing that game of Martian-Hold 'em just before you were officially assigned to this system? Because that was three hundred-and-forty-two years ago!"

"Dammit, man, I had a high straight hand," bellyached the boisterous as usual gray-haired Dick, "and should've taken that last pot!"

"It's not my fault I happened to have a straight flush."

"Not unless you were cheating, you little green-skinned, big-eyed..."

"Wait a minute!" interrupted Tim as he suddenly seemed interested in something other than the decidedly discomforting fact that the Real Martin wasn't at all Human-_like_. Or even remotely Tim's size! "M-Martian-Hold 'em?"

"Yes, it's exactly the same as the game called Texas-Hold 'em here on your Earth, Tim. Only Martian cards are prettier."

"B-b-but..."

"Get a clue, kid," exclaimed a less-than-patient-with-Past-time intruders Dick Solomon, "your 'Uncle' probably introduced some sap from Texas to the game about a hundred years ago!"

"Well, the early-1900s, in Robstown, Texas, to be more precise," quaintly corrected Martin with as much solemn-faced superiority as Tim O'Hara had come to actually love in a pseudo-family member. "But from the point of view of your time-period, Dick, that's almost accurate."

"Great", Tim said with a self-deprecatory snicker. "Next you'll be saying that you inspired the game of Monopoly."

"He/I did!" Dick and Martin said simultaneously, so as to sound like a dual-voiced set of Siamese twins.

"I, uh, n-need a d-drink of w-water. E-excuse me."

Feeling lightheaded and faint, from learning far more about Martin in minutes than he'd learned in the three years the two had shared the same above-garage apartment...

Tim made his way into a kitchen no larger than his own some three-to-four decades earlier and many hundreds of miles to the left of any wall-map of the continental United States...

Wherein sat, somewhat stiffly it seemed, three of the four purple tubes-in-Human bodies aliens around a table that was, itself, a throwback to the Sixties. Which made Tim feel at least a little better.

But it was the sight of the exceedingly lovely, at least on the outside!, Sally Solomon that more than melted away any worries regarding what his pseudo-Uncle actually turned out to be.

"Uh, hi...Sally."

"Hi...Tim."

As the tall and leggy Sally slowly stood, her expression a silly exaggeration of what might dominate the beautiful face of an eighteen-year-old high school senior whilst speaking with a handsome sophomore in college.

Only a little more over-the-top than any normal Human...

Which prompted a groan-in-unison from Tommy and Harry, both still seated to either side of the kitchen table at which, in Dick's stead, Sally sat at its head.

"Shut it!" harshly hissed Sally just loud enough for Harry and Tommy to hear and react with eye-rolling, or, in the case of Harry, rolling, maybe!, behind barely opened little slits through which one could hardly detect eyes at all!, expressions of exaggerated disrespect for the beauteously blond Lieutenant.

Although Harry's squeezed-together, as though tasting a super-sour lemon for the first time _every_ time!, features, quite like those of a true-to-form Village Idiot!, showed such disrespect a lot less expressively.

"What can I get for you, Tim?" Sally said with as sexy a voice and facial affectation as Tim had ever viewed with the lovely ladies he'd dated in his time-period. Which, when he thought about it, meant those self-same beauty's of the Sixties were now wrinkled grandmothers...eech!

"Oh, uh," Tim said, whilst shaking his head to clear it of such sickening images in regards to now old-as-hell females he may have Frenched in some Lover's Lane-like setting. "I, uh, thought I could get a glass of water."

"Sure thing, cutie," Sally said via intense sensuality, especially so since the Big Giant Head had thankfully switched her from Dick's body back into her own! "Here you go."

"What's this?" asked a stupefied Tim as he was handed, from the fridge, a sealed plastic bottle containing crystal clear water. "People of the Future drink water...from bottles? Wouldn't it be easer to just get it straight out of the tap?"

"Drinking water out of the tap?" slightly laughed Tommy, as if Tim had just asked the most incredibly ludicrous thing any Human might utter. Followed, in Village Idiot demeanor!, by Harry...

"Even quivering purple tubes wouldn't dare drink water from a tap. Especially on Earth."

As it seemed Tommy and Harry were enjoying making light of Tim, as well as significantly cramping Sally's style!...

"Why don't you two go out and feed the squirrels?" she snappishly, yet a little too animatedly!, ordered with a sharp head snap toward the secondary exterior door leading out of their apartment via the kitchen.

Even as Tommy and Harry stood to stride past their Amazonian aunt/sister, a squint-eyed Harry ignorantly remarked, "But we don't have any nuts to feed to the squirrels?"

"Yes," suggestively snarled Sally, whilst sinisterly glancing down in the direction of Harry's, er, uh, pants-protected privates. "You _do_."

Even a Village Idiot-type, like Harry, needed no extra explanation prior to clumsily covering up, via consistently scrunched-up clown-like countenance, before following the Information Officer straight through the rear screen door.

"Now, Tim," Sally said after resuming her previous expression of clumsy sexuality, even as she pressed ever closer to Mr. O'Hara. Who definitely didn't mind! "Where were we?"

Having just arrived via police patrol car, Don Orville, that overweight dweeb of a Human who'd so captivated the lovely Sally Solomon, so long as he stayed in his police uniform with leather holster-held police-issue Glock!...

"Hi, guys, is Sally home?"

"Yeah," Harry moronically bemoaned like a little kid of a divorced Soccer Mom on the prowl for a paternal replacement. "But she's busy trying to make it with some Human from..."

"What Harry means," Tommy interjected with a slightly malevolent smirk, "is that she's upstairs just waiting for Officer Don to come rescue her from another boring afternoon."

"Well," Don said whilst straightening his tie about a bullfrog-chinned throat, and adjusting his I'm-a-Big-Loser glasses. "Guess I'd better not keep the lady waiting. See ya!"

Even as Sally's supposed Dreamboat clumsily climbed the exterior stairs in two-to-three step leaps, a lot like a warthog in heat!...

"But," pointed out a still-too-stupid-to-grasp-the-all-too-obvious Harry, "she's up there with that Tim guy from the Past."

"That's right, Harry," Tommy said, still smirking somewhat devilishly, whilst planting an elbow a little harder than needed into Harry's ribs. "She is."

After what would seem, to anyone with a nominal intellect, an inordinately long time, Harry's squint-eyed expression at long last displayed sudden understanding...

"Ohhhhh. Good one."

END OF CHAPTER 3


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

"Sally!"

"That's me," Sally said so nonchalantly to Don, not at all like the suddenly stiff reaction from the Lieutenant who so loved Officer Don, definitely not the too-ordinary out-of-uniform Don! A reaction that seemed to suggest there was an almost telepathic link 'twixt the two whenever one or the other entered, unannounced, into any room.

The reason for this seemingly senseless lapse in that link 'tween a uniformed Officer Don Orville and a leggy, super-sexy Sally Solomon was quite clearly the handsome Lady's Man from some forty years in the Past: Tim O'Hara.

"Sally?" Don pressed in puzzlement over the virtually irrefutable fact that this beauteous blond now no longer stood tall and stiff the instant he stepped within reasonable range. Although never even considering such could be because of this handsome man in the outmoded manner of dress and hair style. "Uh...wh-who's this? Another out-of-town relative...I hope?"

Finally fully turning toward the squat, fat, fully uniformed, complete with leather-like police issue jacket draped about an overweight frame...

"Oh...hi, Don."

Though Sally slide-stepped slightly further from Tim than at the moment of "her man's" entry into the cramped little kitchen, even Don, dimwitted devotee-to-Sally Solomon that he may be!, came to conclude that this possible suitor in Sixties attire might be a very real threat to whatever relationship Sally and Don had had.

"Uh, the name's Don Orville. Officer Don Orville. Part of Rutherford's Finest."

Tim found it hard to believe that last, because it certainly seemed, from this obese officer's appearance, that Rutherford's Finest must station themselves inside a Krispy Kreme donut shop. Still...

"Oh, uh, hi. My name's Tim. Tim O'Hara. Uh, I'm just, uh, visiting with my Martian. Er, uh, my Martin. Uh, m-my Uncle...Martin."

Once more turning his attention back to the tall, blond beauty, Don somewhat anxiously said, "Sally, did you forget our date today? You wanted to go with me to qualify on the gun range again. You know how much you love embarrassing everybody else by putting a clip of bullets into the silhouette head of a paper target."

"Yes," said Sally whilst allowing herself to briefly drift back to the last time she'd done such. Her expression shifting itself into something momentarily comical in its composition. "The way every other officer gathers around me when that little target is reeled in to show that I've put ten bullets straight through the hole made by the first. Mmmm."

Don began to brighten, as Tim seemed a-little-more-than-slightly disappointed that this sexy "sister" to Dick Solomon might be leaving. Then Sally snapped herself back to the moment, and Human men, at hand...

"But I can't leave our, uh, guests today, Don. It'd be rude!"

Thoroughly flustered and definitely baffled, not to mention more than a little hurt!, Don pointed out, "You've never cared about being rude before, Sally. In fact...you're pretty much rude all the time."

"Yeah, well," Sally lied, looking almost Comically awkward, "I've decided to break that habit. So go on without me, Don. We'll get together, maybe, tomorrow for...whatever."

Not so shortsighted this time, especially so when it came to the sensual subject of Sally Solomon!, a detectably downhearted Don Orville lamented, whilst clumsily heading for the kitchen door leading out of the not-so-roomy apartment. "I can take a hint. You like this new guy better than me now! That's fine. There's a lot more fish in the sea, ya know?"

Screwing her coquettish countenance into something usually expected of their dimwitted Transmitter, Harry, Sally stupidly said, "You going fishing, Don?"

With a manic moment of standing-in-place movement, along with some sort of short-lived sound of surreal surprise, Don stormed out...and nearly fell down the exterior stairs whilst hurrying to his parked patrol car...and backed over a couple of metal trash cans...and the tail of a cat...and maybe the toes of an innocent passerby...and...

"He, uh, seemed pretty upset, Sally," Tim finally offered. "M-maybe you should've went with him to that, uh, shooting range."

"Nah!" Sally exaggeratedly answered, as she slipped closer-than-before to this self-professed "swinger" from the Sixties.

From a faraway point in relativistic Time wherein the Lieutenant had placed her purple tubed Self inside some especially fierce-looking being on a planet a long way off from not only this third-rate world, but from the Milky Way galaxy as well. "He'll be back. Today...it's just you and me. And, uh, Dick and Martin. And, uh, maybe Tommy and Harry. But mostly you and me."

"Couldn't have said it better myself," said a smiling-a-little-too much Tim, as the two gazed a-little-too longingly into one another's a-little-too amorous eyes.

As to Dick and Martin in the other room...

"I did not!" an angry Dick loudly, and with an over-the-top attitude to match his comically-shamed mien. "I was the perfect gentleman, when I took out your cousin Segaxius 10-and-three-quarters! In fact, we were the cutest couple at that family reunion you and your parents put together near Olympus Mons. Remember?"

"Actually," insultingly recalled Uncle Martin, aka Exigius 12-and-a half, "you were secretly voted the 'Least Likely to Have a Second Date'. And, believe me, you had some pretty stiff competition...but you still won hands down!"

"Oh! You are so jealous of me, 'Martin'!" an overly-animated Dick childishly sulked. "Just because I'm the smartest person in six-and-a-half galaxies..."

"Ha!", mock-laughed Martin, having already dropped the CCTBS onto the seat of the overstuffed chair in which he had so-stiffly sat a little earlier. "If you're so smart, why can't you help me reprogram my Cathode-ray Centrifugal Time BreakaScope to ensure that Tim and I make it back to our Past-time point without significant side-effects?"

"Maybe," bellyached a balding Dick, his childishness swelling to ludicrous levels, "because I don't feel like it! I'm not gonna waste my considerable intellect on some piece of crap you put together! I'm the High Commander...and you're not. So there!"

Just as Exigius-slash-Uncle Martin was about to counter with something especially insulting and intelligent, his Human-bot body telepathically picked up, scant seconds prior to entering through the ground-level door and quickly climbing the main stairs leading in and up...

"Someone named Mary is coming...now."

Even as Martin dropped his hands, after briefly touching fingertips to temples to employ the telepathy equipment inside the faux-faced red-haired head of what he had earlier revealed to Tim as being an android carrier for a far smaller, green-skinned, almond-eyed, but blue not black!, Self seated therein...

...and as Dick suddenly shifted into a silly exaggeration of someone hopelessly In Love with someone else...

"Dick? Are you up? I thought we had a...oh!...hello."

From the moment Mary Albright reached the top of the stairs to stare into the hypnotically haunting gaze of a seemingly Human man as handsome, for his apparent age!, as Tim...

"Hello."

Uncle Martin made what, in the Sixties, might've been referenced as "moon eyes" in regards to staring back at a still-staring Mary...

"Uh, hi, Mary," Dick Solomon said in an animatedly hyper manner. A blatant attempt to capture his True Love's currently averted, to Martin? No way!, attention. "I, uh, I'm ready to go right now. So, uh, let's just scramble down to the Rambler and..."

"It can wait, Dick," Mary too-calmly remarked, her wide-eyed attention still very much on Martin and vice versa. "Who's your guest?"

"Him?" desperately, and somewhat stupidly, said Dick. "Oh, uh, he's nobody. Just a very old friend from a very long time ago. Uh, come on, Mary, we don't want to be late for, uh, for, uh..."

"My name's Mary. Mary Albright," Dick's date and love-of-his-only-recently-Human life said by way of a hand-extended introduction with a sweet smile to match Martin's own wide-eyed expression of romantic interest.

Gently, and gentlemanly, taking Mary's hand, Tim's pseudo-Uncle half-bowed whilst delivering a very continental kiss to the knuckles of that self-same extended hand.

"My name's Martin...O'Hara. And I am more than pleased to make the acquaintance of such a lovely, lovely lady."

"Ooo," shivered Albright, causing the expectedly overly-dramatic reaction from Dick...

"Damn!"

END OF CHAPTER 4


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5/Conclusion

"Family meeting! Family meeting! Family meeting!"

After shouting such so as to rapidly draw in the loose threads that were, on Earth at least, his "family"...two from somewhere outside, one already standing in the cramped kitchen!...an angry Dick glared hard at a comically confused Tim O'Hara...

"Your not family!"

"Uh, I'll, uh, b-be in th-there," nervously stammered Tim, like someone especially spastic!, to the comically coquettish Sally, whilst gesturing toward the equally small living room. "W-with, uh, Uncle Martian. Martin!"

"Get out!"

"Dick!" exclaimed, also angrily, a snarlingly scowling Sally Solomon of her pseudo-brother, even as Harry and Tommy remain more or less perplexed. More for Harry...less for Tommy.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but I'm not about to simply stand around like an idiot...like Harry!...while that 450-year-old Lothario from Mars hits on my girl!"

"But, Dick," Tommy pointed out, just as any Information Officer should!, "you're older than that."

"_Thank_ you very much for reminding me of that, Tommy!" sarcastically shot back Dick Solomon, his face an exaggerated mask of Comedic emotion.

"Okay, Commander," an impatient-to-be-with-Tim Sally said in a sardonic silliness all her own, "what's the 'family meeting' for?"

"I already told you, Lieutenant!" exasperatedly, and overtly animatedly!, replied, a little too loudly!, Dick to Sally. "It's about that Martian trying to make it with my girlfriend!"

"So what do you want us to do about it, Dick?" Tommy lamented with a self-certain shrug. Especially so since the purple tube inside the still-so-young Tommy Solomon was immensely old. "Kill them?"

The murderous grimace coming over Dick's always amusing, big-headed puss said it all. Causing Tommy to reiterate something that had to be said once before about three years earlier in this, their mission to Earth.

"You _know_ we're not allowed to terminated any Earth life-forms, Dick."

And, exactly like that other time, Dick's twisted countenance intoned stupidly, "All right...I've got _another_ plan."

Meantime, in that little living room whereupon Tim clumsily reentered after being so rudely rushed out of the little kitchen by Dick...

"I had no idea," gushed a smiling-with-intense attraction Mary, as she and Martin now sat in the two overstuffed chairs. "You really know a lot about archeology."

"Yes," Martin stated in true tongue-in-cheek elocution. "It's as if I actually lived during those past time-periods. Ah, Tim! I'd like you to meet Mary Albright. A beautiful lady whose knowledge of ancient Earth rivals my own. Mary, my nephew...Tim O'Hara."

"Oh, uh, hi," Tim said as he shook, a bit too anxiously it seemed!, the hand of Dick's lady-friend for a least the past couple of years. "Uh, U-Uncle Martin, have you, uh, figured out how to get your, uh, homemade 'mechanical calendar' to work again? Because, uh, I have the feeling we're, uh, no longer welcome in the Future."

Having slipped up so idiotically, causing his pseudo-uncle to glare hard via the eyes of the Martin-bot within whose head sat a tiny green-skinned Martian from some as-yet-unexplored-via-man-made robotic rovers, even in the early-21st Century!, Mars...

"Oh, uh, I, uh, meant 'welcome in Rutherford'!" nervously recovered the overly-nervous Tim O'Hara, so as not to arouse suspicion within a woman from Earth unknowingly dating, and mating?, with an alien-within-Human body from far further away than Mars.

"Oh, I'm certain that's not the case, Tim," commented Mary, then added in an unconsciously sexual fashion, "a little Dick goes a long way."

As both Tim's and Martin's eyes flew wide at what was, in actual probability, an innocent statement meant to make reference to an often strange Dick Solomon...

"Incoming message from the Big Giant Head," announced an entranced Harry, knees bent into a half-crouch and arms-and-hands held in true Transmitter sending/receiving fashion. "The information you seek shall be sent straight into the CCTBS device described, and a small charge will appear on your next statement. Transmission ending in three...two...one...ah-_choo_!"

"Did it work?" innocently asked Tommy, as all four crowded together as if expecting the ceiling to suddenly collapse.

"Damn!" loudly, and quite comically!, exclaimed Dick, as it seemed his Harry-transmitted request had, in fact, not been granted. At least, not yet. Then...

As if someone were rapidly rewinding a DVD presentation, instead of Real Life in Rutherford!, everything that had already happened, prior to the arrival-from-the Sixties Tim and Uncle Martin, suddenly and swiftly found the four arguing, as usual!, whilst climbing the inner apartment stairs.

"And I told you that it wasn't a parking space, Lieutenant!"

"C'mon, Dick, you were the one who whipped into that spot like it had shoes for sale! Pretty shoes."

"And never even bothered to notice the wrecking ball dangling nearby."

"Neither did you, you squint-eyed bonehead!"

"I'm no more a bonehead than any other Human, Tommy."

"Wait a minute!" Dick quickly called out, stopping so suddenly that the other three ran into him in an amusingly Comedic manner.

"What?" Sally asked with a scowl as screwy as Dick's.

"I, uh, just had a strange feeling that we'd just done this exact same thing a little earlier," Dick pondered with a perplexed pout.

"We did," harrumphed Tommy. "It's what we do every time we come back home."

Shrugging it off as simple deja vu, the four purple tubes-in-borrowed bodies clumsily continued into their cramped kitchen.

As, some four decades in the Past, in an apartment-over-garage somewhere in the Los Angeles, California area...

"What's the matter, Uncle Martin?" Tim O'Hara casually asked of the red-haired robo-carried being that, utterly unknown by Tim, was a smallish alien-sitting-in-head, ala a future film to be named "Men In Black"...

"What?" he managed, seemingly bewildered for one of the few times in any of the centuries such as he had visited Earth. The Cathode-ray Centrifugal Time BreakaScope situated on the table before the sofa upon which sat the normally cool-as-a-cucumber...which was somewhat greener than the _real_ him!...Uncle Martin. "Oh, uh, I was going to use my CCTBS to take us close to the end of this century, so I could obtain important parts for my spaceship that can't be found at the present time."

"Really?" a suddenly-smiling-with-exaggerated excitement Tim said, as he sat upon the edge of the little table. "Sounds like it'd be a gas, Uncle Martin! So, uh, what's the trouble?"

"I don't know, Tim," Martin replied a little less enthusiastically, in regards to traveling into a Future Now, as opposed to seeming seconds earlier. "Suddenly...it just seems like a bad idea. Plus there's something in my mind-reading head that seems to say...'courtesy of the Big Giant Head'. _And_ there seems to be some sort of financial charge involved!"

Screwing his countenance into incontestable confusion, which bordered dangerously close to the Truly Stupid!, Tim said, just as he stood to stiffly walk away, "Well, Uncle Martin, all the advice I can give you is...if you didn't order it, don't pay for it."

Such a surprisingly moronic comment from his pseudo-nephew, brought about a growing grin to the faux face of the red-haired head in which sat the teeny-tiny Martian.

"Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to hang around a little longer. Tim's starting to grow on me."

With that, the CCTBS device was simply left where it was, as all desire to set it for a Future time-period no longer tugged at the high-IQ thoughts of a bot-carried being from Mars.

END


End file.
